Duelling Timber Floats of Japan's Fushiki Hikiyama Festival

Each spring the town of Fushiki in Japan's Toyama prefecture plays host to a unique cultural event - the Fushiki Hikiyama festival. Timber engineers will find interest in the culmination of the festival: a series of duels in which predominantly wooden festival floats armed with what can only be described as battering-rams, are brought together at speed in a series of spectacular collisions. The authors were brought together by the Civic Cultural Heritage Network Tottori, a Japanese cultural organisation, to carry out a preliminary investigation of the festival floats; both for engineering and cultural interest, and as a possible exemplar of the behaviour of traditionally carpentered structures subject to high dynamic loads. The second, third and fourth authors travelled to Fushiki to observe the May 2016 festival and to carry out an after-the-battle inspection of one of these unique duelling floats. High-speed and high-resolution video was used for digital image correlation measurement of the collisions, to quantify the magnitude of the impact.